Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Sex and the City Pre-Election Day Special

Voters go the polls in two weeks from today, and both houses of Congress are up for grabs. I was reading expert pollster Charlie Cook's website today as I am wont to do around election time and was reminded of Sex and the City.

Cook predicts Democratic takeovers of the House and Senate, an analysis I wish I could agree with. It is true that recent polling looks good. But Cook, like many political analysts in 2002 and 2004, neglects to consider the vastly superior GOP turnout operation - the Repubs know how to get their voters to the polls (I assume it involves promising them free vials of orphan blood or something) and they cheat (a recent gambit involved distributing pamphlets in poor, under-educated precincts in Mississippi that said Republicans should vote on election day while Democrats should vote on November 8th "in order to avoid long lines"). Usually the combination of high turnout and shameless cheating gets Republican candidates 2-5 extra points over what they're polling prior to the actual voting.

Sex and the City ignored a similar gaping political inconsistency sometime back. You may recall the early episodes of Season 3 in which Carrie dated a candidate for City Comptroller (also known as the guy with the urine-in-the-shower fetish - a phenomenon which deserves a blog post in and of itself). She expressed enormous ambivalence about the political process in a conversation with the gals, clearly betraying her as an unregistered voter. Okay. Fast forward to episode 80, "Hop, Skip, and a Week"...Carrie has JURY DUTY! Perhaps Darren Star would like to explain how an unregistered voter gets jury duty. Uh huh...I'm waiting.

Un. Fucking. Believable.

In an age when 15 year old girls are as likely to get excited about civics as Pat Buchanan is about Holocaust reparations, is it any wonder that S&TC can't bother to keep things straight for its target audience? I guess it's all cool as long as the Manolo Blahniks look good. Thanks for ruining democracy, by the way.

I suppose I will one day forgive the writers for this pathetic oversight. But Sarah Jessica Parker - as articulate a spokesperson for abortion rights as any Hollywood A-lister - should know better. She could at least have ad libbed something.

Berger: Are you telling me the guy had a mango in his suitcase?

Carrie: He did! And I'm also telling you that voting is cool!

Berger: Your excitement about the political process has inspired me to not break up with you on a post-it.

2 comments:

Out of all 4 ladies, the only one I could see giving even the slightest shit about the political process is Miranda. Oh, and in real life Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon are both quite involved - didn't KD actually get arrested at some sort of protest involving NYC education standards?